I’ve been looking at webkit automation templates, and they look promising. Supposedly you just plug in your target URL, maybe configure a few parameters, and you’ve got a working scraper or monitoring setup.
But I’m suspicious about the total time investment. Sure, you avoid building from scratch. But then you spend time understanding what the template actually does, figuring out which parts you need to customize, debugging why it doesn’t quite work for your specific case.
So the real question: do templates actually save time compared to building from scratch, or do they just shift where you spend the hours? Like, instead of writing automation from zero, you’re debugging and tweaking a template that’s close but not exact.
Has anyone actually measured this? Or does it just depend entirely on how well the template matches your actual need?